European Investment Bank needs to open towards riskier investments – Sant
The European Investment Bank should remain cautious but become less risk-averse, Labour MEP Alfred Sant told a meeting of the European Parliament's Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON) Committee.
“The EIB is very much a successful institution in the European framework. However, sometimes, the suspicion does creep in that it has been so successful because it has played it safe and that it has always been really featured, or featuring, in investments that are triple A basically, where commercial investments from banking could have been as fruitful,” he said.
There should be some kind of better opening towards riskier investment, if that is the right word, he added. "Being risk averse at this stage, is not going to help us go through the green deal or through digitalisation, where much greater investment is needed both on a public frame and in the private sector. So this is something that I think we need to discuss and cover: how can we make, or how can we help, the EIB become less risk averse, always being of course on the safe side of how it plays the game, but at the same time open to that we need to generate more and more investment. I do not think that this has been really well tackled up to now," Sant added
"Beyond that, the social dimension. The EIB really shirks a bit the social dimension. In terms of governance, but also in terms of investment trust. It is not really paralleling all the time the kind of trust, the kind of momentum, that this Parliament
has been voting for and that the commission has been pushing as well," the former Prime Minister said.
In the same sense of course, the exposure of the EIB to non-European sectors of investments, is something that needs to be looked at, as the Rapporteur has suggested, in greater depth, critically as well, including how, going back to the internal market, how it is really impacting the SME investment. The role of, the trickle down towards SME investment, is not so clear in my view and has not been transparent and effective.
"Finally, also in terms of governance, I am pretty worried about the human resources policy followed by the EIB. Staff surveys show, there is a high level of dissatisfaction with how management is being run, in terms of human resource personnel. The very fact that over four years, five suicides have happened, two of them on EIB premises, among the EIB staff, shows that there is a big problem there. We need to be more transparent, more effective on that," Dr Sant said.